> So let me try again: What I find completely misguided is to move > packages out of core *but still putting them into the release*. In other > words, in my opinion there are really just two options that make sense: > you either keep a package in core, or you kick it out and don't ship it > with the release.
AFAIK I am the one who started with the idea of including ELPA packages in the tarball, so I feel like I have to answer here: The idea was not to push packages out to elpa.git only to then include them in the tarball. Instead, the idea was just to allow some packages into the tarball without having to move them from elpa.git to emacs.git. Their inclusion in the tarball is simply a way to make that package more widely available. E.g., I'd like to include company-mode in Emacs's tarball since this kind of completion is very popular (and also because I think Emacs as a whole suffers from the dilution of effort between company-mode and auto-complete, and I have the delusion that integrating one of the two into the tarball would help solve this problem). We could do it by moving company-mode to emacs.git, but IIRC the maintainer of company-mode would prefer to keep it in elpa.git, so the other option is to bundle that ELPA package into the tarball. I never thought of this as a way to move stuff out of emacs.git. Yet, there is one case where I think it would be beneficial to move a package out of emacs.git only to re-integrate it back into the tarball: Org mode. Org mode is really managed as a separate package (which sadly isn't even present in elpa.git) that happens to be bundled in the tarball: almost no code in the rest of Emacs cares about Org, and the Org code is not tightly dependent on the specific Emacs version with which it is shipped. So IMO it would make more sense to keep Org outside of emacs.git (and save us the trouble of syncing), tho we'd still want to distribute it in Emacs's tarball, since it's an extremely popular package. Stefan